The 2011 Bottimore Lecture at the Museum of the Confederacy: “Fire Eaters at War”

William Lowndes Yancey and Lawrence Massillon Keitt: two fire-eaters that will be discussed at the lecture.

Throughout the 1850s, they were accused of conspiring to instigate secession and to destroy the Union. Most southerners considered them extremists, their rhetoric shrill, their recommendations unrealistic and unnecessary.

But in the crisis of 1860-1861, the so-called “Fire-Eaters” gained the upper hand. Events apparently vindicated their shrill warnings and made their extremism seem like a rational reaction to the election of a Republican president.

Then what? Having succeeded in taking the lower South states out of the Union, what role did the Fire-Eaters play in the nation they helped to create and in the war they helped to cause?

Dr. Eric H. Walther will provide answers to these and other questions in the 2011 Elizabeth Roller Bottimore Lecture, “Fire-Eaters at War.” Co-sponsored by the University of Richmond’s Department of History, the lecture will be held in UR’s Keller Hall at 7:30 p.m., on Thursday, September 22^nd. 

A professor of history at the University of Houston, Walther is a leading authority on the fire-eaters. He is author of The Fire-Eaters, Shattering of the Union: America in the 1850s,and William Lowndes Yancey and the Coming of the Civil War (University of North Carolina Press, 2006). The latter received the Museum’s 2007 Jefferson Davis Award and was an alternate selection of the History Book Club.

The Bottimore Lecture is free, but reservations are required. Click here to register. 

Date: Thursday, September 22, 2011
Time: 7:30 PM - 9:00 PM